Reading has many advantages

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Reading has many advantages, and I don’t just mean transporting you to other worlds, using your imagination, learning from other people’s experiences and expanding your vocabulary (although it obviously helps with those as well). But I find it often helps to inspire better customer service too. While you can see people absorbed in their phones everywhere you look these days, you don’t see people snatching a spare moment to read quite so often. So when I’m standing in a queue and I get my book out, it seems to convey a subliminal message to the staff of ‘I have been waiting here for such an age that I’ve resorted to reading an actual book!!’ and they feel obliged to do something about it. It just happened when I went to the supermarket earlier. I would far rather read for a few minutes than have to deal with one of those awful self-checkout machines, so I got my book out while I waited (with several other people I might add) for the only till staffed by an actual human. They promptly opened another till and ushered me to it so I would be first through. Good service, although I have to admit I hadn’t even read a whole page and would have been happy enough to wait a bit longer and get a chance to read a few pages!